In the late 1800's and early 1900's, several of the European languages went through a reform to simplify/standardize the spelling to pronunciation correllation - for example Spanish and Italian have such "strict correlation between spelling and how it sounds" - there are a few rules besides "what does letter <x> sound like", such as "ch" is pronounced "k" [why not use K one can ask, but so it is], and "gn" is pronounced more like "nj" or "ny", so "gnochi" is not pronounced the way it looks for someone from outside of italy, but "nyoki".
George Bernard Shaw was one to propose such reform. More here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_spelling_reform
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Mats
